Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

> What, are we pretending the last several decades of blissfully ignored potential anti-trust cases, questionable mergers, etc. aren't the direct result of captured legislators being told to just sit on their hands?

Regulatory capture isn't just industry capturing the government so they can avoid regulations. They capture the government so they can control the regulations, and then use them to exclude competitors by increasing regulatory barriers to entry.

It's pretty hard to sustain a monopoly in a market with low barriers to entry because the entry cost is lower than the prevailing prices, and new entrants don't sell to the monopolist unless they're offered more than they could make from staying in the market, which is in turn more than the cost of entry. So entering the market stays profitable because you either make money by selling to customers or you make money by getting acquired. But the monopolist doesn't actually have an unlimited supply of money for acquisitions, so new competitors keep popping up until they run out of cash and then one of them sticks, or one of them is e.g. a co-op that isn't interested in selling.

To prevent this the monopolist needs the market to have higher barriers to entry. One way of doing this is to become so vertically integrated that new entrants would have to reproduce the entire supply chain to enter the market, and this is the case where you actually need antitrust enforcement, but it also isn't the common case. And it's hard for anyone to get a vertically integrated monopoly to begin with without the common case, because it's hard to monopolize the vertical before you have a monopoly in the original market.

The common case is the monopolist gets the government to pass laws making it more expensive to enter the market until new entrants are deterred.

> Offshoring manufacturing and permitting AG conglomerates to bankrupt the majority of family farmers has resulted in rural communities being stripped of economic opportunities which caused a flood of economic refugees into high cost residential markets. Proof: pundits screech about a lack of affordable housing when ~8 million units sit unoccupied, many outright abandoned.

This is just "demand is not always in the same place as it was before", it's only a problem if you constrain supply from increasing in the places where the demand has moved. This is the same reason you can have unoccupied units and a shortage at the same time, when the units aren't in the same location as the demand. The vacancy rate in e.g. Manhattan is at record lows.

Also, the shortage is by significantly more than 8 million units.

> when zoning changes are made to permit the kind of multi-story mixed use structures that are hyped as a solution to the housing crisis what happens is they get built, the local market gets an influx of condos that nobody who lives in the area can afford and nearby housing increases in cost (a net reduction in affordable housing), literally the exact opposite of the effects advertised.

This is the "induced demand" theory, which is rubbish. There is more demand for higher density areas than there is supply, so the price is high. If you increase the density of an area, you satisfy some of the demand, not only by creating that housing but by increasing the density of that area, which makes it more attractive because it can now sustain more local shops etc., so more people also want to move into the directly adjacent existing housing.

This does decrease the cost of housing, it's just that the housing that becomes more affordable isn't the housing directly adjacent to the new housing. It's in the place people left in order to move there.

What's happening is essentially this: Suppose you have areas with density levels 1, 2 and 3. Level 3 is the most dense, most desirable and most expensive. You increase the density of a level 2 area so it becomes a level 3 area by building more housing. The price of all three density levels goes down across the region, because there are now more level 3 areas available, so you don't have to bid as high to live in one, and some people move from level 1 and 2 areas to the new level 3 area, which makes more supply available there too. But that specific neighborhood used to be level 2 and is now level 3, so it, unlike the region as a whole, can increase in price, because the new level 3 price might still be more expensive than the old level 2 price.

And even that can be solved by building enough level 3 housing across the region so that the cost of level 3 housing falls below the previous cost of level 2 housing, but for that you have to build even more.

> This phenomenon is also driving up the cost of performing clinical trials as these outfits are savvy enough to intentionally target practices that perform trials. The resulting increase in fees to run a clinical trial are so steep they trigger fraud warnings in industry benchmarking software.

To take one example, the US requires separate clinical trials from the ones already done in Europe. There is no legitimate reason to even be doing them a second time, the European ones should be accepted for approval for sale in the US, but they're not. Because the incumbents like it that way, because it reduces competition and they own the regulators.

Another solid example is the entire concept of certificate of need laws. It's quite possibly the most naked example of anti-competition legislation in existence.

> Anyway, given we're the only industrialized nation who's healthcare system isn't entirely controlled by the government this claim seems pretty rich.

There are several industrialized countries with private healthcare systems that are all more efficient than the US system. The US system is notoriously corrupt and inefficient because the incumbents use regulation to inhibit competition.

Please don't cross into personal attack in HN threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Easier said than done these days. We had a coop managing out drinking water with local government support. Being a coop excluded them from grants and eventually the board burnt out and gave up. Local government now operates the thing - you'd think they'd be accountable to voters but they can only get grant money with strings attached. They can repair a few pipes only if they install chlorination that no one wants and will add more maintenance costs because of pressure from health and safety - the provider must guarantee water is safe at the end point so boiling water, which everyone does here, is no longer acceptable apparently. There isn't a big enough population that increasing the cost of water would make a difference.

All that to say, voters here do care about utilities, and the coop solution worked for about 25 years iirc but it can't work in today's "one solution fits all" regulatory context anymore, at least where i live. Things are far from that simple in practice.

Yes, markets are suppose to kick you when you are down.

My gut says it is like needing for example a car. You could rent or lease or you could buy one in cash on on credit. Each choice makes sense to someone. If it is to be a collective choice/deal it should be cheaper and I see no reason why it can't offer the same options. We have this weird tendency to shove all collective arrangements in governments boots where we know the outcome will be something stupid, turn into something ridiculous or both.

I really want to see gov processes strictly defined. Then we can have the government set up entirely independent bodies that strictly follow their charter. Ideally it pays no taxes, no one works there, no one owns it. I might even like blockchain for this purpose. We want 1234 new lease contracts for 2026, any company may bid, customers press accept. The one most accepted gets to provide the [proverbial] cars.

It seems doable.

i'd be careful telling someone that they don't know about power grids.

All the microgrids you describe provide basic needs. None power serious industry anywhere.

Batteries are a good solution for certain situations, not as a fix-all. All the batteries in the world can power a large power system like California or Quebec for minutes. That's right - minutes.